The Buffalo Sabres are a legitimate playoff contender. This isn’t news, but when you get a chance to open an article that way, you must seize the opportunity.

As we approach the NHL All-Star Break (and subsequent bye week), let’s take a look at some team-wide trends in all phases of the game, and assess the road ahead. Busting the league’s longest active playoff drought won’t be easy, but the blue-and-gold are hitting their stride at the right time to make it happen.

Offensive Dominance

When the Sabres’ offensive prowess began turning heads early in the 2022-23 season, the question of sustainability was brought up quite often. For a team that, in recent history, had struggled to establish consistency on offense, those questions weren’t without merit.

Though Don Granato’s high-event system showed certain hallmarks of sustainability, the extent of it remained to be seen. As we cross the midway threshold, the Buffalo offensive onslaught has shown no signs of slowing down.

Aside from an eight-game blip from November 4 to November 19 (where they produced a pedestrian GF/60 rate of 2.29 as a team), the Sabres’ overall team GF/60 rate of 3.74 in all situations has ranked somewhere among the top-three teams in the NHL all year. Currently, the Sabres are tied with the Edmonton Oilers for the top mark in the league in that category.

The best part about all of this is where the goals are coming from, particularly as of late. At the beginning of the season, a majority of the Sabres’ tangible offensive production was coming from the de facto top-six forward group.

The line of Tage Thompson, Jeff Skinner, and Alex Tuch was scoring in bunches, while the famed “Kid Line” of Dylan Cozens, JJ Peterka, and Jack Quinn contributed a steady clip of secondary goal support.

Over the last month or so, the goal-scoring rates from the top-six forwards have slowed down a bit. Fortunately, the revamped third line of Victor Olofsson, Tyson Jost, and Casey Mittelstadt has picked up some of the slack.

Since I just wrote about this group last week, I won’t dive too deep into the context behind their recent play here. Still, their recent uptick in performance is a big reason why the Sabres have maintained their offensive outputs despite slight scoring-pace regressions from the other top forward lines.

As we approach the final 33 games of the 2022-23 campaign, the Sabres are the second-most effective shot-conversion team in the league (trailing only the Seattle Kraken) and their current xGF/60 rate of 3.39 in all situations is good for 11^th. Pair them together, and it’s easy to see how the Sabres have become an elite goal-production squad.

Should these trends continue (there is little evidence to suggest they won’t), the Sabres should have enough scoring depth to maintain their production through the end of the season.

Defensive Improvement

On top of the team’s newfound depth scoring, their recent team xGA improvement has been something of a revelation. Over the last month of the season, only Mattias Samuelsson holds an xGF rate of under 50% at five-on-five among Sabres defensemen (as surprising as that is). For contextual comparison, as of December 1, Rasmus Dahlin was the only Buffalo defender with an xGF rate of over 50% in all situations.

As a team, the Sabres rank 17th in even-strength xGA rate (3.23) since the turn of the new year. This serves in stark contrast to their rate of 3.52 (good for 25th in the league at the time) from the beginning of the season until the end of December. Now that the defense seems to be fully healthy for what seems like the first time all year, the improvement in their overall results has been noticeable.

Amazingly, the Sabres’ most impressive recent trends on defense have come from the de facto third-pairing (which has featured a few different faces). Following an abysmal first half of the season, Ilya Lyubushkin is now the team’s defensive xGF leader for January. Jacob Bryson has also experienced an uptick of his own.

As a pair, they’ve remained somewhat inconsistent in terms of game-by-game performance, but when they’re “on”, they’ve done a great job of smothering opposing offenses in relatively sheltered minutes. That’s the beauty of having Rasmus Dahlin and Owen Power on your top two pairings (especially when the blue line is at maximum health). Granato can afford to shelter his third tandem with relative ease, and the underlying results speak for themselves.

I’m not quite as confident that this overall team defensive trend sustains itself compared to what we’ve seen from the Sabres’ offense. That said, as long as they resemble something close to an average NHL defensive corps for the remainder of the year, it should be enough to push the team over the edge in terms of playoff contention.

Between the Pipes

In tandem with what we’ve seen from the Sabres’ defense as of late, the Buffalo netminders have performed in kind. As the team’s xGA rate has drastically improved, so has their play in net.

The first 25 games looked like a reenactment of the goaltending performances we saw during the historically poor 2021-22 campaign. The Sabres’ team save percentage of 88.54% ranked second-last in the NHL during that initial stretch.

Behind a battered and shorthanded defensive corps, Eric Comrie and Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen struggled in particular, posting a combined GSAx rate of -11.78. Craig Anderson provided some strong starts, but his veteran “pitch count” has limited how often he’s been able to appear in games.  

Recently, however, their collaborative fortunes have changed. While the Sabres’ goaltending isn’t what I’d refer to as an area of strength at this point, it has made its way into “league average” territory. In the 24 games to follow their atrocious start, the Buffalo netminders have produced an all-situation save percentage of 90.99%, which is good for eleventh in the NHL in that span.

It’s a big part of the reason why the Sabres have won so many games lately. As previously mentioned, the combined xGA improvement combined with improved play in net and increased depth scoring has turned the Sabres into something of a force to be reckoned with.

The Road Ahead

So, what’s next? With exactly 33 games remaining on the schedule, the current standing-point goal is somewhere in the 95-point range for any team in the Easter Conference with playoff aspirations. By my estimation, that would mean the Sabres need to accumulate at least 20 more wins to close out the 2022-23 campaign.

It’s a reasonable target. Outside of the famed eight-game losing streak, Buffalo has produced wins at a rate that exceeds the projected qualification clip. A lot can change between now and April, but let’s take a look at a few key factors down the stretch.

Of the Sabres’ next 33 opponents, 16 of them are currently in playoff position (based on standing-point percentage). In a league where exactly half the teams qualify for the postseason, that’s a pretty normal ratio.

For my amusement, I wanted to see how the Sabres stack up against their remaining opponents in terms of team xGF rate. In all situations, Buffalo ranks ahead of exactly one-third of the teams left on the schedule. That’s not as dire as it sounds, as the Sabres continue to make up for xG shortcomings with their previously-referenced shooting rate.

To me, there are seven “critical matchups” left on the docket. These games are against other Eastern Conference teams in direct competition with the Sabres for the two wild card slots. They include matchups against the Florida Panthers, Washington Capitals, and New York Islanders (two remaining meetings against each), as well as one more encounter with the Detroit Red Wings.

For particularly ambitious and optimistic fans, the remaining two games against the Tampa Bay Lightning have an outside chance of becoming “four-point swing games” as well.

The playoff odds models have been all over the map when it comes to the Sabres this year. Moneypuck seems to be the most bullish on the Sabres’ chances, giving them a 58.2% chance at qualification as of today. Our friends at PuckLuck are in the same boat, currently giving Buffalo 50% odds on the nose.

Conversely, the Hockeyviz model isn’t quite as optimistic, projecting the blue-and-gold around 90 points (which equates to roughly a 27% chance at qualification). Some models weight past outcomes a little more heavily, which would assuredly hurt a team that has missed every postseason since the second term of the Obama Administration.

We’ll see how things shake out, but the playoff race is on, and the Sabres sit at center stage as we head into the All-Star break. A victory over a tough Carolina Hurricanes team on home ice tomorrow night would be quite a way to head into the break and set the tone down the stretch.

Charts and Advanced Metrics courtesy of Evolving Hockey and Hockeyviz

Photo Credit: Jonathan Kozub/NHLI via Getty Images